The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history
By Lewis H Lapham
When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self_confounding, so remote from the
basic American consensus, ever got so far?
-Richard Hofstadter
In company with nearly every other historian and political journalist east of the Mississippi River in the summer
of 1964, the late Richard Hofstadter saw the Republican
Party's naming of Senator Barry Goldwater as its candidate in that year's presidential election as an event
comparable to the arrival of the Mongol hordes at the gates of thirteenth_century Vienna. The "basic American
consensus" at the time was firmly liberal in character and feeling, assured of a clear majority in both chambers
of Congress as well as a sympathetic audience in the print and broadcast
press. Even the National Association of Manufacturers was still aligned with the generous impulse of Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal, accepting of the proposition, as were the churches and the universities, that government
must do for people what people cannot do for themselves. *
* With regard to the designation "liberal," the economist John K. Galbraith said in 1964, "Almost everyone now
so describes himself." Lionel T Tilling, the literary critic, observed in 1950 that "In the United States at this time,
liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole in_ teUectual tradition." He went on to say that "there are
no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circula_ don," merely "irritable mental gestures which seek to
re_ semble ideas. "
And yet, seemingly out of nowhere and suddenly at the rostrum of the San Francisco Cow Palace in a roar of
triumphant applause, here was a cowboy-hatted herald of enlightened selfishness threatening to sack the
federal city of good intentions, declaring the American government the enemy of the American people, properly
understood not as the guarantor of the country's freedoms but as a syndicate of quasi-communist bureaucrats
poisoning the wells of commercial enterprise with "centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility,
and regimentation without recourse." A band played "America the Beautiful," and in a high noon glare of klieg
light the convention delegates beheld a militant captain of capitalist jihad ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is
no vice!") known to favor the doctrines of forward deterrence and preemptive strike ("Let's lob a nuclear bomb
into the men's room at the Kremlin"), believing that poverty was proof of bad character ("lazy, dole-_happy
people who want to feed on the fruits of somebody else's labor"), that the Democratic Party and the network
news programs were under the direction of Marxist ballet dancers, that Mammon
was another name for God.
The star-spangled oratory didn't draw much of a crowd on the autumn campaign trail. The electorate in 1964
wasn't interested in the threat of an apocalyptic future or the comforts of an imaginary past, and Goldwater's
reactionary vision in the desert faded into the sunset of the November election won by Lyndon Johnson with 61
percent of the popular vote, the suburban sheriffs on their palomino ponies withdrawing to Scottsdale and
Pasadena in the orderly and inoffensive manner of the Great Khan's horsemen retiring from the plains of
medieval Europe.
Departed but not disbanded. As the basic American consensus has shifted over the last thirty years from a
liberal to a conservative bias, so also the senator from Arizona has come to be seen as a prophet in the
western wilderness, apostle of the rich man's dream of heaven that placed
IN THE 1970S A CADRE OF ULTRACONSERVATIVE
MILLIONAIRES BECAME BENT ON RESCUING
THE COUNTRY FROM THE HIDEOUS
GRASP OF SATANIC LIBERALISM
Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and provides the current Bush Administration with the platform on
which the candidate was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law
enforcement, and the paper elephants.' The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths
now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street ]ournal-government the problem, not
the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer-and while
listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that Hofstadter didn't
stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and" bizarre make its way into the center ring of the
American political circus?
$2_Billion Assets
CONSERVATIVE FOUNDATIONS
The Bradley Foundation 584
Smith Richardson Foundation494
Scaife Family (Four Foundations)478
EarhartFoundation" 84
JohnM. Olin Foundation 71
Koch Family (Three Foundations) 68
Castle Rock (Coors) Foundation 50
JM Foundation 25
Philip M. McKenna Foundation 17.4
(in $ Millions)
. The rightward movement of the country's social and political center of gravity isn't a matter of opinion or
conjecture. Whether compiled by Ralph Nader or by journalists of a conservative persuasion (most recently
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooklridge in a book entitled The Right Nation) the numbers tell the same
unambiguous story-one in five Americans willing to accept identity as a liberal, one in three preferring the term
"conservative"; the American public content with lower levels of government spending and higher levels of
economic inequality than those per
taining in any of the Western European democracies; the .United States unique among the world's developed
nations in its unwillingness to provide its citizens with a decent education or fully funded health care; 40 million
Americans paid less than $10 an hour, 66 percent of the population earning less than $45,000 a year; 2 million
people in prison, the majority of them black and Latino; the country's largest and most profitable corporations
relieved of the obligation to pay an income tax; no politician permitted to stand for public office without first
professing an ardent faith in God.
About the workings of the right-wing propaganda mills in Washington and New York I knew enough to know that
the numbing of America's political senses didn't happen by mistake, but it wasn't until I met Rob Stein, formerly
a senior adviser to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that I came to fully appreciate the
nature and the extent of the re-education program undertaken in the early 1970s by a cadre of
ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country from the hideous grasp of
Satanic liberalism. To a small group of Democratic activists meeting in NewYork City in late February, Stein had
brought thirty-eight charts diagramming the organizational structure of the Republican "Message Machine," an
octopus-like network of open and hidden microphones that he described as "perhaps the most potent,
independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system.
It was an impressive presentation, in large part because Stein didn't refer to anybody as a villain, never
mentioned the word "conspiracy." A lawyer who also managed a private equity investment fund-i.e., a man
unintimidated by spread sheets and indifferent to the seductions of the pious left-Stein didn't begrudge the
manufacturers of corporatist agitprop the successful distribution of
their product in the national markets for the portentous catch-phrase and the camera-ready slogan. Having
devoted several months to his search through the available documents,
he was content to let the facts speak for themselves-fifty funding agencies of different dimensions and varying
degrees of ideological fervor, nominally philanthropic but zealous in their common hatred of the liberal. enemy,
disbursing the collective sum. of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years for the fabrication of irritable
mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
The effort had taken many forms-the publication of expensively purchased and cleverly promoted tracts (Milton
Friedman's Free to Choose, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, Samuel Huntington:s The Clash of Civilizations) ,
a steady flow of newsletters from more than 100 captive printing presses (among them those at The Heritage
Foundation, Accuracy in the Media, the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Study of Popular
Culture), generous distributions of academic programs and visiting professorships (to Harvard, Yale, and
Stanford universities), the passing along of sound-bite slanders (to Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge), the
formulation of newspaper op-ed pieces (for the San Antonio Light and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as well as
for the Sacramento Bee and the Washington Times). The prolonged siege of words had proved so successful
in its result that on nearly every question of foreign or domestic policy in this year's presidential campaign, the
frame and terms of the debate might as well have been assembled in Taiwan by Chinese child labor working
from patterns furnished by the authors of ExxonMobil's annual report.
No small task and no mean feat, and as I watched Stein's diagrams take detailed form on a computer screen
(the directorates of the Leadership Institute and Capital Research Center all but identical with that of The
Philanthropy Roundtable, Richard Mellon Scaife's money dispatched to the Federalist Society as well as to The
American Spectator), I was surprised to see so many familiar names-publications to which I'd contributed
articles, individuals with whom I was acquainted-and I understood that Stein's story was one that I could
corroborate, not with supplementary charts or footnotes but on the evidence of my own memory and
observation.
The provenience of the Message Machine Stein traced to the recognition on the part of the country's corporate
gentry in the late 1960s that they lacked the intellectual means to comprehend, much less quell or combat, the
social and political turmoil then engulfing the whole of American society, and if I had missed Goldwater's
foretelling of an apocalyptic future in the Cow Palace, I remembered my own encounter with the fear and
trembling of what was still known as "The Establishment," four years later and 100 miles to the north at the July
encampment of San Francisco's Bohemian Club. Over a period of three weeks every summer, the 600-odd
members of the club, most of them expensive ornaments of the American haute bourgeosie, invite an equal
number of similarly fortunate guests to spend as many days as their corporate calendars permit within a grove
of handsome redwood trees, there to listen to the birdsong, interest one another in various business
opportunities, exchange misgivings about the restlessness of the deutschmark and the yen.
In the summer of 1968 the misgivings were indistinguishable from panic. Martin Luther King had been
assassinated; so had Robert Kennedy, and everywhere that anybody looked the country's institutional
infrastructure, also its laws, customs, best-loved truths, and fairy tales, seemed to be collapsing into anarchy
and chaos-black people rioting in the streets of Los Angeles and Detroit, American soldiers killing their officers
in Vietnam, longhaired hippies stoned on drugs or drowned in the bathtubs of Bet Air, shorthaired feminists
playing with explosives instead of dolls,
the Scottsdale and Pasadena sheriffs' posses preparing their palomino ponies to stand firm in the face of an
urban mob.
Historians revisiting in tranquillity the alarums and excursions of the Age of Aquarius know that Revolution Now
was neither imminent nor likely-the economy was too prosperous, the violent gestures of rebellion contained
_within too small a demographic, mostly rich kids who could afford the flowers and the go_go boors-but in the
hearts of the corporate chieftains wandering among the redwood trees in the Bohemian Grove in July 1968, the
fear was palpable and genuine. The croquet lawn seemed to be sliding away beneath their feet, and although
they knew they were in trouble, they didn't know why. Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more
important than they had guessed; unfortunately, they didn't have any. The American property holding classes
tend to be embarrassingly ill at ease with concepts that don't translate promptly into money, and the beacons of
conservative light shining through the liberal fog of the late 1960s didn't come up to the number of clubs in
Arnold Palmer's golf bag. The company of the commercial faithful gathered on the banks of California's Russian
River could look for succor to Goldwater's autobiography, The Conscience of a Conservative, to William F.
Buckley's editorials in National Review, to the novels of Ayn Rand. Otherwise they were as helpless as unarmed
sheepherders surrounded by a Comanche war party on the old Oklahoma frontier before the coming of the
railroad and the six-gun.
The hope of their salvation found its voice in a 5000-word manifesto written by Lewis Powell, a Richmond
corporation lawyer, and circulated in August 1971 by the United States Chamber of Commerce under the
heading Confidential Memorandum; Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. Soon to be appointed to
the Supreme Court, lawyer Powell was a man well-known and much respected by the country's business
community; within the legal profession he was regarded as a prophet. His heavy word of warning fell upon the
legions of reaction with the force of Holy Scripture: "Survival of what we call the free enterprise system," he
said, "lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an
indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political ;$.'
power available only through united action and national organizations."
The venture capital for the task at hand was provided by a small sewing circle of rich philanthropists-Richard
Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, Lynde and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee, John
Olin in New York City, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina, Joseph Coors in Denver, David and
Charles Koch in Wichita-who entertained visions of an America restored to the safety of its mythological past-
small towns like those seen in prints by Currier and Ives, cheerful factory workers whistling while they worked,
politicians as wise as Abraham Lincoln and as brave as Teddy Roosevelt, benevolent millionaires presenting
Christmas turkeys to deserving elevator operators, the sins of the flesh deported to Mexico or France.
Suspicious of any fact that they hadn't known before the age of six, the wealthy saviors of the Republic also
possessed large reserves of paranoia, and if the world was going rapidly to rot (as any fool could plainly see)
the fault was to be found in everything and anything tainted with a stamp of liberal origin-the news media and
the universities, income taxes, Warren Beatty, transfer payments to the undeserving poor, restraints of trade,
Jane Fonda, low interest rates, civil liberties for unappreciative minorities, movies made in Poland, public
schools!
_. The various philanthroPic foundatioris under the control of the six families possess assets estimated in 2001
at $1.7 billion. Harry Bradley was an early and enthusiastic member of the John Birch Society; Koch Industries
in the winter of 2000 agreed w pay $30 minion (the largest dvil fine ever imposed on a private American
company under any federal environmental law) to settle claims related to 300 oil spills from its pipelines in six
states,
Although small in comparison with the sums distributed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the money
was ideologically sound, and it was put to work leveraging additional contributions (from corporations as well as
from other ,_ like-minded foundations), acquiring radio stations, newspapers, and journals of opinion,
bankrolling intellectual sweatshops for the making of political and socioeconomic theory. Joseph _ Coors
established The Heritage Foundation with" an initial gift of $250,000 in 1973, the sum augmented over the next
few years with $900,000 from Richard Scaife; the American Enterprise Institute was revived and fortified in the
late seventies with $6 million from the Howard Pew Freedom Trust; the Cato Institute was set up by the Koch
family in 1977 with a gift of $500,000.
If in 1971 the friends of American free enterprise could turn for comfort to no more than seven not very
competent sources of inspiration, by the end of the decade they could look to eight additional installations
committed to "joint effort" and "united action."* The senior officers of the Fortune 500 companies meanwhile
organized the Business Roundtable, providing it by 1979 with a rich endowment for the hiring of resident
scholars loyal in their opposition to the tax and antitrust laws.
The quickening construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted
in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs, and background briefings intended to bring
about the ruin of the liberal idea in all of its institutionalized forms-the demonization of the liberal press, the
disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education-and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived
in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity. Well in advance of
inauguration day the Christmas elves had churned out so much paper that had they been told to do so, they
could. have shredded it into tickertape and welcomed the new cowboy-hatted herald of enlightened selfishness
with a parade like none other ever before seen by man or beast. Unshredded, the paper was the stuff of
dreams from which was made Mandate for Leadership, the "bible" presented by The Heritage Foundation to Mr.
Reagan in the first days of his presidency with the thought that he might want to follow its architectural design
for an America free at last from "the tyranny of the Left," Rescued from the dungeons of "liberal fascism," once
again a theme park built by nonunion labor along the lines of Walt Disney's gardens of synthetic Eden.
* Paul Weyrich, the first director of The Heritage Foundation, and often described by his admirers as "the Lenin
of social conservatism," seldom was at a loss for a military analogy: "If your enemy has weapons systems
working and is killing you with them, you'd better have weapons system of your own "
Signs of the newly minted intellectual dispensation began showing up in the offices of Harper's Magazine in
1973, the manuscripts invariably taking the form of critiques of one or another of the absurdities then making
an appearance before the Washington congressional committees or touring the New York literary scene with
Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer. Over a period of several years the magazine published articles and essays
by authors later to become well .known apologists for the conservative creed, among them George Gilder,
Michael Novak, William Tucker, and Philip Terzian; if their writing in the early seventies was remarkable both for
its clarity and wit, it was because they chose topics of opportunity that were easy to find and hard to miss.
THE PAMPHLETS, HISTORIES, AND BACKGROUND BRIEFINGS WERE INTENDED TO BRING ABOUT THE
RUIN OF THE LIBERAL IDEA IN ALL ITS INSTITUTIONALIZED FORMS
The liberal consensus hadn't survived the loss of the Vietnam War. The subsequently sharp reduction of the
country's moral and economic resources was made grimly apparent by the impeachment of Richard Nixon and
the price of Arab oil, and it came to be understood that Roosevelt's New Deal _as no longer on offer. Acting on
generous impulse and sustained by the presumption of limitless wealth, the American people had enacted
legislation reflecting their best hopes for racial equality and social justice (a.k.a. Lyndon Johnson's "Great
Society"), but any further efforts at transformation clearly were going to cost a great deal more money than the
voters were prepared to spend. Also a good deal more thought than the country's liberal-minded intelligentsia
National Think Tank Budgets 2001
American Enterprise Institute 25
The Heritage Foundation, 33
Hoover Institution, 23
Cato Institute 17.6
Hudson Institute 7.8
Manhattan Institute 7.2
Citizens for a sound Economy 5.4
Reason Foundation 4.9
National Center for Policy Analysis 4.7
Competitive Enterprise Institute 3.2
Free Congress Foundation 2.7
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis 2.5
(in millions)
were willing to attempt or eager to provide. The universities chose to amuse themselves with the crossword
puzzles of French literary theory, and in the New York media salons the standard bearers of America's political
conscience were content to rest upon what they took to be their laurels, getting by with the striking of noble
poses (as friends of the earth or the Dalai Lama) and the expression of worthy emotions (on behalf of
persecuted fur seals and oppressed women). The energies once contained within the nucleus of a potent idea
escaped into the excitements of the style incorporated under the rubrics of Radical Chic, and the messengers
bringing the good news of conservative reaction moved their gospel, singing tent show into an all but deserted
public square.
By THE END OF REAGAN'S SECOND TERM THE
PROPAGANDA MILLS WERE SPENDING
$100 MILLION A YEAR ON THE MANUFACTURE
AND SALE OF THEIR PRODUCT
Their chief talents were those of the pedant and the critic, not those of the creative imagination, but they well
understood the art of merchandising and the science of cross-promotion, and in the middle 1970s anybody
wishing to appreciate the character and purpose of the emerging conservative putsch could find no better
informant than Irving Kristol, then a leading columnist for the Wall Street ]ournal, the author of well_received
books (On the Democratic Idea in America and Two Cheers for Capitalism), trusted counselor and adjunct sage
at the annual meetings of the Business Roundtable. As a youth in the late 1930s, at a time when literary name
and reputation accrued to the accounts of the soi_ disant revolutionary left, Kristol had proclaimed himself a
disciple of Leon Trotsky, but then the times changed, the winds of fortune shifting from east to west, and after a
stint as a CIA asset in the 1950s, he had carried his pens and papers into winter quarters on the comfortably
upholstered bourgeois right.
On first meeting the gentleman at a literary dinner in New York's Century Club, I remember that I was as much
taken by the ease and grace of his manner as I was impressed by his obvious intelligence. A man blessed with
a sense of humor, his temperament and tone of mind more nearly resembling that of a sophisticated dealer in
art and antiques than that of an academic scold, he praised Harper's Magazine for its publication of Tom
Wolfe's satirical pieces, also for the prominence that it had given to the essays of Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, and I was flattered by his inclination to regard me as an editor' of_ promise who might be recruited to
the conservative cause, presumably as an agent in place behind enemy lines. The American system of free
enterprise, he said, was being attacked by the very people whom it most enriched-i.e., by the pampered
children of privilege disturbing the peace of the Ivy League universities, doing lines of cocaine in Manhattan
discotheques, making decadent movies in Hollywood-and the time had come to put an end to their dangerous
and self_indulgent nonsense. Nobody under the age' thirty knew what anything cost, and even the senior
faculty at Princeton had forgotten that was none other than the great Winston Churchhill who had said,
"Cultured people are merely glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production."
In the course of our introductory conversation Kristol not only referred me to other masters whom I might wish
to re-read (among them Plutarch, Gibbon, and Edmund Burke he also explained something of his technique; an
intellectual entrepreneur. Despite the warning cries raised by a few prescient millionaires far from the
fashionable strongholds of the effeminate east, the full membership of the America oligarchy still wasn't alive to
the threat of cultural insurrection, and in order to awaken the management to a proper sense of its dire peril
Kristol had been traveling the circuit of the country's corporate boardrooms, solicitIng cortributions given in
memory of Friedrich von Hayek, encouraging the automobile companies to withdraw their advertising budgets
from any media outlet that declined to echo their sod: and political prejudices.
"Why empower your enemies?" he said. "why throw pearls to swine?'"
Although I didn't accept Kristol's invitation to what he called the "intellectual counter revolution," I often ran
across him during the next few years at various symposia addressed to the collapse of the nation's moral
values, and never failed to enjoy his company or his conversation. Among all the propagandists pointing out
the conservative path to glory, Kristol seemed to me the brightest and the best, and I don’t wonder that he
eventually became one of the four or five principal shop stewards overseeing the labors of the Republican
message machine.
It was at Kristol's suggestion that I met a number of the fund_raising people associated with the conservative
program of political carrectness, among them Michael Joyce, executive d rector in the late seventies of the Olin
Foundation. We once traveled together on a plan returning to New York from a conference that
* Henry Ford II expressed a similar thought on resigning as a trustee of the Ford Foundation in late 1976.
Giving vent to his confusion, annoyance, and dismay, he took the trouble to write a letter to the staff of the
foundation reminding them that they were associated with "a creature of capitalism." Conceding that the word
might seem "shocking" to many of the people employed 'in the vint yards of philanthropy, Mr- Ford proceeded
to his defense of the old ways and old order:
"I'm not playing the role of the hard_headed tycoon who thinks all philanthropoids are Socialists and all
university professors are Communists. I'm just suggesting to the trusteet and the staff that the system that
makes the foundation possible very probably is worth preserving ,
Joyce had organized for a college in Michigan, and somewhere over eastern Ohio he asked whether I might
want to edit a new journal of cultural opinion meant to rebut and confound the ravings of The New York Review
of Books. The proposition wasn't one in which I was interested, but the terms of the offer-an annual salary of
$200,000, to be paid for life even in the event of my resignation or early retirement-spoke to the seriousness of
the rightist intent to corner and control the national market in ideas.'"
The work went more smoothly as soon as the Reagan Administration had settled itself in Washington around
the fountains and reflecting pools of federal patronage. Another nine right-thinking foundations established
offices within a short distance of Capitol Hill or the Hay-Adams hotel (most prominent among them the
Federalist Society and the Center for Individual Rights); more corporations sent more money; prices improved
for ideological piecework (as much as $100,000 a year for some of the brand-name scholars at Heritage and
AEI), and eager converts to the various sects of the conservative faith were as thick upon the ground as maple
leaves in autumn. By the end of Reagan's second term the propaganda mills were spending $100 million a year
on the manufacture and sale of their product, invigorated by the sense that once again it was morning in
America and redoubling their efforts to transform their large store of irritable mental gestures into brightly
packaged policy objectives-tort reform, school vouchers, less government, lower taxes, elimination of the labor
unions, bigger military budgets, higher interest rates, reduced environmental regulation, privatization of social
security, downsized Medicaid and Medicare, more prisons, better surveillance, stricter law enforcement.
• The proposed journal appeared in 1982 as The New Criterion, promoted as a "staunch defender" of high
culture, "an articulate scourge of artistic mediocrity and intellectual mendacity wherever they are found." Joyce
later took over direction of the Bradley Foundation, where he proved to be as deft as Weyrich and Kristal at
what the movement conservatives liked to call the wondrous alchemy of turning intellect into influence.
If production increased at a more handsome pace than might have been dreamed of by Richard Scaife or
hoped for by Irving Kristol, it was because the project had been blessed by Almighty God. The Christian right
had come into the corporate fold in the late 1970s. Abandoning the alliance formed with the conscience of the
liberal left during the Great Depression (the years of sorrow and travail when money was not yet another name
for Jesus), the merchants of spiritual salvation had come to see that their interests coincided with those of the
insurance companies and the banks. The American equestrian classes were welcome to believe that slack-
jawed dope addicts had fomented the cultural insurrection of the 1960s; Jerry Falwell knew that it had been the
work of Satan, Satan himself and not one of his students at the University of California, who had loosed a
plague of guitarists upon the land, tempted the news media to the broadcast of continuous footage from Sodom
and Gomorrah, impregnated the schools with indecent interpretations of the Bible, which then gave birth to the
monster of multiculturalism that devoured the arts of learning. Together with Paul Weyrich at The Heritage
Foundation, Falwell sponsored the formation of the Moral Majority in 1979, at about the same time and in much
the same spirit that Pat Robertson, the Christian televangelist, sent his congregation a fund-raising letter
saying that feminists encourage women to "leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism and become lesbians." Before Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term the city of God signed a
nonaggression pact with the temple of Mammon, their combined forces waging what came to be known as "The
Culture War."
Mass Media Ditribution-300M Conservative message machine
TELEVISION
Pat Robertson's 700 Club
.. Fox News Channel
MSNBC's Scarborough Country
Oliver North's War Stories
,. RADIO
.The Rush Limbaugh Show
. The Cal Thomas Commentary -Radio America
. PUBLISHING
- Eagle Publishing, Inc.
. NEWSPAPERS
. The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
WEBSITES
Townhall.com
'-AnnCoulter.com
The Cold War against the Russians was fading into safe and nostalgic memory, and the tellers of the great
American fairy tale (the one about the precious paradise ever in need of an invincible defense) found
themselves in pressing need of other antagonists to take the place of the grim and harmless ogre in the
northern snow. The Japanese couldn't play the part because they were lending the United States too much
money; the Colombian drug lords were too few and too well connected in Miami; Manuel Noriega failed the
audition; the Arab oil cartel was broke; and the Chinese were busy making shirts for Ralph Lauren.
In the absence of enemies abroad, the protectors of the American dream at home began looking for domestic
signs of moral weakness rather than-foreign shows of military strength; instead of examining.the dossiers of
distant tyrants, they searched the local newspapers for flaws in the American character, and the surveillance
satellites over Leipzig and Sevastopol were reassigned stations over metropolitan Detroit and the Hollywood
studios filming Dynasty and Dallas. Within a matter of months the conservative committees of public safety
rounded up as suspects a motley crowd of specific individuals and general categories of subversive behavior
and opinion-black male adolescents as well as elderly female Buddhists, the New York Times, multiculturalists
of all descriptions, the 1960s, welfare mothers, homosexuals, drug criminals, illegal immigrants, performance
artists. Some enemies of the state were easier to identify than others, but in all instances the reactionary tellers
of the tale relied on images seen in dreams or Arnold Schwarzenegger movies rather than on the lessons of
their own experience.
For a few years I continued to attend convocations sponsored by the steadily proliferating agencies of the
messianic right, but although the.discussions were held in increasingly opulent settings--the hotel
accommodations more luxurious, better food, views of the mountains as well as the sea-by 1985 I could no
longer stomach either the sanctimony or the cant. With the coming to power of the Reagan Administration most
of the people on the podium or the tennis court were safely enclosed within the perimeters of orthodox opinion
and government largesse, and yet they persisted in casting themselves as rebels against "the system,"
revolutionary idealists being hunted down like dogs by a vicious and still active liberal prosecution. The pose
was as ludicrous as it was false. The leftist impulse had been dead for ten years, ever since the right-wing
Democrats in Congress had sold out the liberal portfolio of President Jimmy Carter and revised the campaign-
finance laws to suit the convenience of their corporate patrons. Nor did the news media present an obstacle. By
1985 the Wall Street ]ournal had become. the newspaper of record most widely read by the people who made
the decisions about the country's economic policy; the leading editorialists in the New York Times (A. M.
Rosenthal, William Safire) as well as in the Washington Post (George Will, Richard Harwood, Meg Greenfield)
ably defended the interests of the status quo; the vast bulk of the nation's radio talk shows (reaching roughly
80 percent of the audience) reflected a conservative bias, as did all but one or two of the television talk shows
permitted to engage political topics on PBS. In the pages of the smaller journals of opinion (National Review,
Commentary, The American Spectator, The Nationallnterest, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, Policy
Review, etc.) the intellectual decor, much of it paid for by the Olin and Scaife foundations, was matched to the
late-Victorian tastes of Rudyard Kipling and J. P. Morgan. The voices of conscience that attracted the biggest
crowds on the nation's lecture circuit were those that spoke for one or another of the parties of the right, and
together with the chorus of religious broadcasts and pamphlets (among them Pat Robertson's 700 Club and the
publications under the direction of Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), they enveloped the
country in an all but continuous din of stereophonic, right-wing sound. .
The facts seldom intruded upon the meditations of the company seated poolside at the conferences and
symposia convened to bemoan America's fall from grace, and I found it increasingly depressing to listen to
prerecorded truths dribble from the mouths of writers once willing to risk the chance of thinking for themselves.
Having exchanged intellectual curiosity for ideological certainty, they had forfeited their powers of observation
as well as their senses of humorj no longer courageous enough to concede the possibility of error or enjoy the
play of the imagination, they took an interest only in those ideas .that could be made to bear the weight of
Solemn doctrine, and they cried up the horrors of the culture war because their employers needed an alibi for
the disappearances of the country's civil Liberties and a screen behind which to hide the privatization (a.k.a.
the theft) of its common property-the broadcast spectrum as well as the timber, the water, and the air, the
reserves of knowledge together with the mineral deposits and the laws. Sell the suckers on the notion that their
"values" are at risk (abortionists escaping the nets of the Massachusetts state police, pornographers and
cosmetic surgeons busily at work in Los Angeles, farm families everywhere in the Middle West becoming
chattels of the welfare state) and maybe they won't notice that their pockets have been picked.
So many saviors of the republic were raising the alarm of culture war in the middle eighties that I now can't
remember whether it was Bob Bartley writing in the Wall Street Joumal or William Bennett speaking from his
podium at the National Endowment for the Humanities who said that at Yale University the students were
wallowing in the joys of sex, drugs, and Karl Marx, disporting themselves on the New Haven green in the
reckless manner of nymphs and satyrs on a Grecian urn. I do remember that at one of the high-end policy
institutes in Manhattan I heard the tale told by Norman Podhoretz, then the editor at Commentary, the author of
several contentious books
(Making It and Why We Were in Vietnam), and a rabid propagandist for all things anti-liberal. What he had to
say about Yale was absurd, which I happened to know because that same season I was teaching a seminar at
the college. More than half the number of that year's graduating seniors had applied for work at the First
Boston Corporation, and most of the students whom I'd had the chance to meet were so busy finding their way
around the Monopoly board of the standard American success (figuring the angles of approach to business
school, adding to the network of contacts in their Filofaxes) that they didn't have the time to waste on sexual
digressions either literal or figurative. When I attempted to explain the circumstance to Podhoretz, he wouldn't
hear of it. Not only was I misinformed, I was a liberal and therefore both a liar and a fool. He hadn't been in New
Haven in twenty years, but he'd read William F. Buckley's book (God and Man at Yale, published in 1951), and
he knew (because the judgment had been confirmed by something he'd been told by Donald Kagan in 1978)
that the college
was a sinkhole of depraved sophism. He knew it for a fact, knew it in the same way that Jerry Falwell knew that it
was Satan who taught Barbra Streisand how to sing. .
IN THE ABSENCE OF ENEMIES ABROAD, THE PROTECTORS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM BEGAN TO LOOK
FOR DOMESTIC SIGNS
OF MORAL WEAKNESS
If Kristol was the most engaging of the agents provocateur whom I'd encountered on the conservative lecture
circuit in the 1980s, Podhoretz was the dreariest-an apparatchik in the old Soviet sense of the word who
believed everything he wished to prove and could prove everything he wished to believe, bringing his patrons
whichever words might serve or please, anxious to secure a place near or at the boot of power. Unfortunately it
was Podhoretz, not Kristol, who exemplified the character and tone of mind that edged the American
conservative consensus ever further to the right during the decade of the 1990s. . The networks of reactionary
opinion once again increased their rates of production, several additional foundations recruited to the cause,
numerous activist organizations coming on line, together with new and improved media outlets. (most notably
Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Weekly Standard) broadcasting the gospels according to saints Warren
Harding and William McKinley. By 1994 the Conservative Political Action Conference was attracting as many as
4,000 people, half of them college students, to its annual weekend in Arlington, Virginia, there to listen to the
heroes of the hour (G. Gordon Liddy, Ralph Reed, Oliver North) speak from stages rapped in American flags.
Americans for Tax Reform under the direction of Grover Norquist declared its intention to shrink the federal
government to a size small enough "to drown," like one of the long_lost hippies in Bel Air, "in a bathtub."
THE CONTRACT WITH AMERICA PROVIDED
THE TERMS OF ENLIGHTENED SELFISHNESS
THAT SHAPE AND INSPIRE THE POLICIES
OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
Although as comfortably at home on Capitol Hill as in the lobbies of the corporate law firms on
K Street, and despite their having learned to suck like newborn lambs at the teats of government pa_ tronage
(Kristol's son, William, serving as public_ relations director to Vice President Dan Quayle; Podhoretz's son-
in_law, Elliot Abrams, a highly placed official within the Reagan Administration subsequently indicted for criminal
misconduct), the apologists for the conservative cause continued to pose as embattled revolutionaries at odds,
with the "Tyranny of the Left." The pretense' guaranteed a steady flow of money from their corporate sponsors,
and the unexpected election of Bill Clinton in 1992 offered them yet another chance to stab the corpse of the
liberal Goliath. The smearing of the new president's name and reputation began as soon as he committed the
crime of entering the White House. The American Spectator, a monthly journal financed by Richard Scaife, sent
its scouts west into Arkansas to look for traces of Clinton's semen on the pine trees and the bar stools. It wasn't
long before Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr undertook his obsessive inspection of the president's bank
records, soul, and penis. Summoning witnesses with the fury of a suburban Savonarola, Starr set forth on an
exploration of the Ozark Mountains, questioning the natives about wooden Indians and painted women. For four
years he camped in the wilderness, and even after he was allowed to examine Monica Lewinsky's lingerie
drawer, his search for the weapon of mass destruction proved as futile as the one more recently conducted in
Iraq.
Eight Influential Books and the Foundations who Sponsored Them
Free to Choose
Milton Friedman Scaife Foundation
Olin Foundation!
,The Naked Public Squarel
Richard John Neuhaus!
, Lilly Endowment'
Bradley Foundation
Olin Foundation
The Dream and the _
Nightmare
Myron Magnet
Scaife Foundation, .J
Illiberal. Education
Dinesh
Olin Foundation
Losing Ground
Charles Murray . 1 Olin Foundation i (Smith Richardson Foundationi ;.,
Politics,Markets and American Schools
JohnE Chubb and Terry M Moe
The Clash of Civilizations , Samuel Huntington
: Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation!
Although unable to match Starr's prim selfrighteousness, Newt Gingrich, the Republican congressman from
Georgia elected speaker of the House in 1995, presented himself as another cham
pion of virtue (a self-proclaimed "Teacher of the Rules of Civilization") willing to lead the American people out of
the desolation of a liberal wasteland. Like Starr and Podhoretz (also like the newscasters who now decorate the
right-wing television studios), Gingrich had a talent for bearing grudges. During his sixteen years in Congress
he had acquired a reputation (not undeserved) for being nasty, brutish, and short, eventually coming to stand
as the shared and shining symbol of resentment that bound together the several parties of the disaffected right-
the Catholic conservatives with the Jewish neoconservatives, the libertarians with the authoritarians, the
evangelical nationalists with the paranoid monetarists, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition with the friends of
the Ku Klux Klan. Within a few months of his elevation to the speaker's chair, Gingrich bestowed on his fellow-
plaintiffs his Contract with America, a plan for rooting out the last vestiges of liberal heresy in the mind of
government. As mean-spirited in its particulars as the Mandate for Leadership handed to Ronald Reagan in
1980, the contract didn't become law, but it has since provided the terms of enlightened selfishness that shape
and inspire the policies of the current Bush Administration.
During the course of the 1990s I did my best to keep up with the various lines of grievance developing within
the several sects of the conservative remonstrance, but although I probably read as
many as 2,000 presumably holy texts (Peggy Noonan's M newspaper editorials and David Gelemter's magazine
articles as well as the soliloquies of Rush Limbaugh and the sermons ofRoberr N Bork), I never learned how to
make sense of the weird and too numerous inward contradictions.
How does one reconcile the demand for small government with the desire for an imperial army,
apply the phrases "personal initiative" and "self reliance" to corporation presidents utterly
dependent on the federal subsidies to the banking, communications, and weapons industries,
square the talk of "civility" with the strong-arm methods of Kenneth Starr 'and Tom DeLay, match the
warmhearted currencies of "conservative compassion" with the cold cruelty of "the unfettered free
market," know that human life must be saved from abortionists in Boston but not from cruise
missiles in Baghdad? In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a
certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on
which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on
federal housing, an essay on the payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or
the wonder of the u.s. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale--
money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people,
making them stupid as well as weak.
But if a set of coherent ideas was hard to find in all the sermons from the mount, what was not hard
to find was the common tendency to believe in some form of transcendent truth. A religious as
opposed to a secular way of thinking. Good versus Evil, right or wrong, saved or damned, with us or
against us, and no light-minded trifling with doubt or ambiguity. Or, more plainly and as a young
disciple of Ludwig Von Mises had said, long ago in the 1980s in one of the hospitality tents set up to
welcome the conservative awakening to a conference on a beach at Hilton Head, "Our people deal
in absolutes."
Just so, and more's the pity. In place of intelligence, which might tempt them to consort with wicked
or insulting questions for which they don't already possess the answers, the parties of the right
substitute ideology, which, although sometimes archaic and bizarre, is always virtuous.
Virtuous, but not necessarily the best means available to the running of a railroad or a war. The
debacle in Iraq, like the deliberate impoverishment of the American middle class, bears witness to
the shoddiness of the intellectual infrastructure on which a once democratic republic has come
to stand. Morality deemed more precious than liberty; faith-based policies and initiatives ordained
superior to common sense.
As long ago as 1964 even William F. Buckley understood that the thunder on the conservative right amounted
to little else except the sound and fury of middle-aged infants banging silver spoons, demanding to know why
they didn't have more-more toys, more time, more soup; when Buckley was asked that year what the country
could expect if it so happened that Goldwater was elected president, he said, "That might be a serious
problem." So it has proved, if not under the baton of the senator from Arizona then under the direction of his
ideologically correct heirs and assigns. An opinion poll taken in 1964 showed 62 percent of the respondents
trusting the government to do the right thing; by 1994 the number had dwindled to 19 percent. The measure
can be taken as a tribute to the success of the Republican propaganda mill that for the last forty years has
been grinding out the news that all government is bad, and that the word "public," in all its uses and
declensions (public service, citizenship, public health, community, public park, commonwealth, public school,
etc.),connotes inefficiency and waste. The dumbing down of the public discourse follows
as the day the night, and so it comes as no surprise that both candidates in this year's presidential election
present themselves as embodiments of what they call "values" rather than as the proponents of an idea.
Handsome images consistent with those seen in Norman Rockwell's paintings or the prints of Currier and Ives,
suitable for mounting on the walls of the American Enterprise Institute, or in one of the manor houses owned by
Richard Mellon Scaife, maybe somewhere behind a library sofa or over the fireplace in a dining room, but
certainly in a gilded frame.
By turning the media into a cabal of right wing crack-pots the greedy criminal class got their just deserts; a
fucked up economy and an unnecessary war.
Someone said Rush Limbaugh and FOX news were CIA news. He asked me, why else would they devote a
whole network to get the former CIA directors son elected, . That might be true. I do believe the directors of
FOX news are mentally ill just as I believe people like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove are mentally ill. But they are
unaware of their mental illnes because of their greed and twisted minds. Because of this, the results of their
actions will be to simply fuck up the world. If Bush, our fake president had any interest in ending tyranny and
promoting democracy, he might ask someone with a rational mind to replace everyone at FOX News. Lawrence
Eagleburg from Bush's fathers administration seemed to make sense when he spoke. If Bush wants democracy
in america he might have his daddys CIA have someone like Eagleburg replace everyone at FOX News. But
George W or George H won't do this because they know that without the propaganda of FOX news a moron
like George W could never get elected.
Also If he really wanted democracy he would hve the CIA bump off the CEO's of companies like Debolts that are
manufacturing rigged voting machines.
Excerpt from the article I printed in my 1/26 comment by Paul Starr
"The First Amendment also puts the media in a distinctive position in relation to campaign-finance laws. Only media
corporations can make what are, in effect, unlimited contributions by promoting the candidates they favor. Rupert
Murdoch can put FOX and his entire empire at the service of a candidate or a cause. That's his right. But hardly
anyone else can put comparable resources to political use at election time."
Drowned Out
BY ROBERT B. REICH
Readers of The American Prospect don't need to hear that Donald Rumsfeld has been an awful defense
secretary, that our actions in Iraq are fueling global rerrorism, that George W. Bush's tax breaks for the rich
are widening the gap between the rich and everyone else, that our government is now run by corporate
America and right-wing evangelicals, and that these clowns and scoundrels have already imperiled our nation
and the world for generations to come. You know these things.
Unfortunately, comparatively few Americans read The American Prospect. But tens of millions of Americans
listen to right-wing radio and watch right-wing television. And they are being fed a stream of lies that parrot the
untruths and distortions emanating from the White House. The public square is dominated by radical
Republicans.
Recently I accepted an invitation to be on Sean Hannity's radio show, which is carried by nearly 400 stations
around the country. I'm promoting a new book, Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America (Alfred A.
Knopf). Hannity has been touring the country, broadcasting his right-wing creed in front of large crowds.
On this day, Hannity was broadcasting from Chicago. I phoned in at the appointed time. Hannity introduced me
as a "liberal," and I heard the assembled crowd emit a loud boo. He then asked me if I thought Rumsfeld should
resign. I said Rumsfeld should be fired. The crowd booed again. At this point Hannity played a tape, purporting
to be the voice of John Kerry, who admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Hannity then asked me how
someone who had committed atrocities could call for Rumsfeld's resignation and run for president of the United
States. The crowd cheered.
When I began to answer, Hannity cut me off. I tried to get a word in, but Hannity continued to rant about John
Kerry and the liberals who want to destroy the country. I could hear the crowd roar its approval. I tried again to
be heard, but Hannity talked over me. I decided to keep talking but my words seemed to make no difference.
The crowd was cheering Hannity's diatribe. One listener e-mailed me later in the day to explain that Hannity's
sound engineer had apparently turned down the volume on me, in order to ensure that Hannity's voice
predominated.
All over talk radio and talk TV, liberal voices are being drowned out. Prior to 1987, when the Federal
Communications Commission overturned the fairness doctrine, broadcasters had to air opposing views on
controversial issues if they wanted to keep their licenses. Now, hosts of talk radio and talk television-almost all
of them rightwingers-are interested in airing only one view: their own.
The problem runs deeper. Hannity is also the host of one of FOX News' most highly watched cable-television
shows, and he and FOX promote each show on the other medium. Hannity also promotes his books on his
radio and TV shows, which may help explain why his most recent screed, titled Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating
Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, was at the top of The New York Times best-seller list for several weeks in
March and April. Hannity's Midwest broadcast tour revving up crowds of right-wing faithful against liberals,
Democrats, and John Kerry in particular-is a logical extension of the other media enterprises.
Make no mistake: The entire effort is designed to get George W. Bush re-elected and install a permanent right-
wing Republican majority in America. Bill O'Reilly, another FOX News TV host, also has a radio show, which is
carried nationally on more than 400 stations. Like Hannity, O'Reilly uses these mouthpieces to promote his
books and goes on broadcast tours to summon Republican crowds and stroke the passions of the right.
MSNBc's Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, is attempting to use the same formula.
The problem for liberals and Democrats is not just that we have nothing comparable to this widening empire of
right-wing demagoguery (Air America Radio is trying, but it's in few markets so far). The real problem is that
liberals refrain from demagoguery because we don't believe in it. Liberalism is the opposite of fanaticism. We
cherish tolerance. We value deliberation. We respect rational argument. We oppose all forms of tyranny. We
have faith-and it is nothing but faith-that, in the end, they won't be able to drown us out, because common
sense and common decency are on our side. I hope we're right.
Too Little, Too Late
BY ROBERT PARRY
George W Bush's electoral victory is chilling proof conservatives have achieved dominance over the flow of
information to the American people and that even a well run Democratic campaign stands virtually no chance
for national success without major changes in how the news media operates.
It is not an exaggeration to say today that the most powerful nation on earth is in the grip of an ideological
administration-backed by a vast network of right-wing think tanks, media outlets and attack groups-that can
neutralize any political enemy with smears, such as the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry's war record, or
persuade large numbers of people that clearly false notions are true, like Saddam Hussein's link to the 9/11
attacks.
The outcome of the 2004 election also highlights perhaps the greatest failure of the Democratic-liberal side in
American politics: a refusal to invest in the development of a comparable system for distributing information that
can counter the right's potent media infrastructure. Democrats and liberals have refused to learn from the
lessons of the Republican -conservative success.
The history is this: For the past quarter century, the right has spent billions of dollars to build a vertically
integrated media apparatus-reaching from the powerhouse Fox News cable network through hardline
conservative newspapers and magazines to talk radio networks, book publishing, well-funded Internet
operations and right-wing bloggers.
Using this infrastructure, the conservatives can put any number of "themes" into play that will instantaneously
reach tens of millions of Americans through a variety of outlets, whose messages then reinforce each other in
the public's mind.
Beyond putting opposing politicians on the defensive, this right-wing machine intimidates mainstream journalists
and news executives who will bend over backward and cater to the conservative side, do almost anything to
avoid being tagged with the career threatening tag of " liberal
In contrast to the right's media juggernaut, the left relies largely on a scattered network of cash-strapped Web
sites, a few struggling magazines and a couple of hand-to-mouth satellite TV networks.
Plus, the evidence is that wealthy progressives still don't "get if' Even with the election looming, Air America, a
promising AM radio network founded to challenge Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk radio monopoly, was
hobbled by the refusal of rich liberals to invest in the venture. I
In a new book, Road to Air America, Sheldon Drobny, one of the network's founders, describes his frustrating
appeals to East and West coast "limousine liberals" who didn't want to engage in the project. I have
encountered similar rebuffs dating back to the early' 90S, after my experiences as a mainstream investigative
journalist for the Associated Press and Newsweek convinced me that the biggest threat to American democracy
was the growing imbalance in the national news media. Yet even as conservative foundations were pouring
tens of millions of dollars into building hard-edged conservative media outlets, liberal foundations kept
repeating the refrain: "We don't do media:' One key liberal foundation explicitly forbade even submitting funding
requests that related to media projects.
What I saw on the left during this pivotal period was an ostrich -like avoidance of the growing threat from the
right's rapidly developing news media infrastructure.
Right-wing money
As the liberals stayed on
the sidelines in the '80S and '90S, the conservative media gained powerful momentum from foreign sources of
money, particularly from South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Moon alone invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington Times and other conservative outlets,
while gaining protection for his dubious money operations from Republican defenders inside the U.S.
government.
The right also made clear that its plan was to wage the "war of ideas;' which conservatives did not mean in a
metaphorical sense. The right's goal has been to destroy or at least marginalize its enemies through various
kinds of information warfare. To reverse Prussian military strategist
Karl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, one might say that for conservatives the "war of ideas" is merely the
continuation of violent conflict by other means, including the use of propaganda and disinformation.
Yet, instead of joining this ideological battle, the liberal Democratic side largely divided up its money between
do good projects, such as buying up threatened wetlands, and spending on activism, such as voter registration
and get-out the vote drives. While there's nothing wrong with these activities, the election's outcome has
demonstrated again that in an age of media saturation, street level activism isn't enough.
Even when liberal money is earmarked for media, the funds are usually controlled and spent by political
activists. For instance, Campaign 2004's "Media Fund;' run by former Clinton administration official Harold
Ickes, spent millions of dollars from liberal donors on TV ads placed with mainstream media outlets. Little, if
anything, was spent on building year-in-year-out media, like the conservatives have done.
That means that at the end of a campaign, nothing of permanence is left behind. The liberals wait until the next
election cycle to gin up their operations again, while the conservatives spend
the next four years, every day, pitching their arguments to the American people and making their political base
even stronger.
The end result of this imbalance has been that American democracy has been diminished. Indeed, the great
American experiment with a democratic republic may be on the verge of becoming meaningless, since much of
the information distributed through the conservative echo chamber is either wrong or wildly misleading-and
since the mainstream press has been so thoroughly housebroken.
No birthright
Yet, while it's certainly true that the Bush administration and its allies have shown little
regard for truthful information, it's also a legitimate criticism of the Democrats and progressives
that they haven't fought nearly as hard as they should for honest information, the oxygen of any healthy
democracy.
While many Americans see information as a birthright that is supposed to be delivered to them by the press like
a newspaper thumping on the front doorstep, it is really a right that must be fought for like any other important
right.
As George W. Bush celebrates is historic victory, the Democrats, left -of-center foundations _and wealthy
American liberals should finally recognize that their long pattern of starving _honest, independent media has
contributed to putting the nation-and the planet-on the edge of a catastrophe.
John Kerry’s well-fought campaign-and the youthful energy that surrounded it, may have been an
encouraging sign, but the hard truth is: It was too little, too late. ..
ROBERT,PARRY, who broke many the Iran-Contra stories in the '80S 'T the Associated Press and Newseek,
most recent book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It can be o.dered at
secrecyandprivilege.com.
Wake-Up Time
Yes, Bush has bullied the national media. But are they really powerless? Only if they play along. Herewith,
five suggestions for how the Fourth Estate can stop the Charade
BY ERIC ALTERMAN AND MICHAEL TOMASKY
_ARE OUR NATIONAL MEDIA-SCHOOLYARD SILLY DURING
campaign 2000, by turns somnolent and sycophantic ever since-starting to rouse themselves from their long
torpor? It's still way too early to answer that question with a "yes," but if that's what the answer turns out to be,
the first week of February may have marked a turning point.
In that week, the media started raising new questions about the justification for the Iraq War; broke an important
story about the administration knowing last fall that the Medicare bill would cost $134 billion more than it let on
to its employers (the public); broke another about a probe of alleged bribes at Dick Cheney's Halliburton; and
finally, led by The Boston Globe's Walter Robinson, started to take a semi-meaningful look into George W.
Bush's disputed National Guard record.
Don't start dancing to the music just yet, though. Bad habits die hard, and we've all come to expect too little
genuine journalism and far too much of what might be called "journalism-related program activity." This is what
we got back in 2000, when Al Gore was deemed a lying SOB for statements he made that were wholly accurate.
(Gore did play a large role in creating the predecessor to the Internet, he did hold the hearings that
"discovered" contamination at Love Canal, and his only mistake regarding that most crucial of "lies" about who
inspired the characters in Erich Segal's Love Story was accurately recalling a decades-old mistaken story in
The Tennessean.) Remember, he was running against a guy who couldn't remember a year of his military
service or anything connected with a million-dollar bailout he received regarding a fishy stock sale during which
he was privy to inside information about the same stock's likely collapse. But hardly anyone thought those
questions worth examining.
That was campaign 2000: almost no investigation of Bush's past and aggressive misrepresentation in his favor
when the stories finally did come up. Karl Rove couldn't have asked for anything more.
We understand: It's tough out there. Campaign reporters have grueling jobs and can't always be expected to
produce big-picture journalism. In the Bush White House, meanwhile,
journalists have been forced to do their jobs under profoundly onerous conditions. In his much-discussed
January 19 New Yorker article, Ken Auletta detailed the multiple ways in which the Bush administration has
successfully shackled reporters. Among the straitjacket techniques detailed there and elsewhere: limited (or no)
access, interviews granted on restrictive terms, rare presidential press conferences, and substance-less
"availabilities" in which reporters get to ask Bush two or three questions, which they have been told had best
relate to the topic Bush wants to discuss. The reporters described by Auletta's diligent reporting seem to
believe themselves all but powerless to resist.
Come now. This isn't Pacifica Radio we're discussing here. These are the largest, richest, most powerful media
corporations in the world, billion-dollar babies with plenty of resources at their disposal. What's one presidential
administration to them? In time, Bush will be back in Crawford swatting Titleists. The Sulzbergers and the
Grahams, to say nothing of General Electric and AOL Time Warner, will never be removed from office. That
their journalists in Washington -with a small but still significant number of admirable exceptions-have quietly
caved in to these conditions mayor may not be unethical, but it is disgraceful. That the owners have let it
happen will be their shameful legacy.
The fat lady has not yet completed her aria, however. The Democrats have stiffened their spines, and Bush's
problems have grown unignorable. Election 2004 offers ample opportunity for the ambitious men and women of
the Fourth Estate to reassert their power and professional pride. It is in that hope and spirit that we offer the
following suggestions for reporters and editors this time around:
1. Go beyond the "he said, she said" and tell us what you believe to be true and important about a story. The
chief convention of most news reporting-this side says this, that side says that-needs a drastic rethink. In the
age of spin, an age brought to new lows by this White House, a formula that requires giving equal weight to
both sides ends up helping the side that's lying. So when Bush says, as he often did during the last campaign,
"By far, the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom end of the spectrum," this obvious and
factually checkable lie got the same play in most stories as the truth did. The he said, she said convention
actually blurred the truth.
This reflex was at work in the major papers' coverage of Bush's February 7 Meet the Press interview. Some of
the news stories were skeptical, especially Dana Milbank's in The Washington Post. Even so Bush plainly made
several claims that simply were not true. Reporters were aware of this, having received a well-documented fact-
check from the Center for American Progress within hours of the interview's broadcast. Still, many allowed Bush
to continue to attempt to justify the war on grounds that had already been discredited.
We've entered an age in which instantaneous Web analyses are quickly getting readers accustomed to ways of
taking in news that are more frank and opinionated. Editors need to reconsider these conventions and
reinvigorate them so that they are less concerned with giving equal weight to each side and more concerned
with pursuing the factual truth (and yes, this should apply to lying Democrats as well). Truth is sometimes
elusive and hard to pin down. It is, however, the point.
2. Challenge the master narrative with genuine investigative reporting. Do you have a good idea of how
presidential sibling Neil Bush makes his money these days? Can you describe even briefly what Interior
Secretary Gale Norton has been up to for the last three years? Can you name three (or even one) of Bush's
top 10 corporate contributors? Do you know anything about The Carlyle
Group beyond the fact that the president's father is affiliated with it?
If the media were working properly, you'd be able to answer at least a couple of those questions. But unless
you're among America's most ferocious newshounds, you can't. And the reason you can't is that investigaive
reporting has all but disappeared in Washington.
We're aware of the many reasons for this problem: reduced newsroom budgets, Bush administration
intimidation, and more. But the primary culprit is the tyranny of an instant news cycle coupled with the power of
the master narrative. The cable shows, the Sunday shows, the major news weeklies, and, to a lesser extent, the
leading editorial and op-ed pages-with the hard-right radio world providing the background white noise-
establish a story line: Bill Clinton is Slick Willie, George W. Bush is Winston Churchill. All Democrats are sissies
unless proven otherwise. In the land of the 24-hour news-cycle, the narrative, which gets repeated over and
over until it takes on the veneer of being true even when it's nonsensical, is king.
With the glorious exception of the indomitable Seymour Hersh (and damn few others), the Washington media
have given this administration an almost total pass. Even the one criminal probe into the administration, the
Valerie Plameleak investigation, was itself leaked to The Washington Post by a disgruntled administration
official and only became a full-blown story after the Department of Justice announced its investigation.
_ Speaking at Harvard University last spring, Wasltington Post Executive Editor Len Downie said the following:
"So if you do tough investigative reporting about Democrats or about issues that are important to the left,
you'll get a strong backlash from the left. Similarly, if you do tough investigative reporting of the Republicans or
people on the right, you'll get a strong backlash from them. And I think this is also having an impact on the
media. It's scaring people."
There you have it. The top editor at America's second most-important newspaper admits that angry phone calls
and e-mails are frightening editors (it's a good thing there was no Internet when Ben Bradlee was editor, we
guess). And in a bit of painful poetic justice, the paper's most famous and once-great investigative reporter,
Bob Woodward, has reverted to the role of court stenographer; channeling the majesty, greatness, and
unwavering resolve of Bush, Cheney, and company in exchange for unrestricted access to national security
meetings and documents that are routinely denied to more critically minded reporters.
3. Show proportionality in covering controversies. In the runup to John Kerry's February 3 victories in five
states, The New York Times' Glen Justice and John Tierney published a front-page article examining
Kerry's and other Democrats' contributions from special interests. Fair enough: The public has a
right to know. But it also has a right to knowledge that's placed in some sort of sensible context. Take a look at
this sentence, for instance: "Mr. Kerry denounces President Bush for catering to the rich, but he has
depended " more heavily on affluent donors than the other leading Democrats except for another populist,
Senator John Edwards." Just how does Kerry's standing vis-a-vis the other Democrats provide a
useful measure of whether Bush caters to the rich? And do Kerry's contributions from special interests
come even close to those of the president? Thisquestion is not explored with reporting. Instead, the
authors tell us, using the paradigmatic "to be sure" construction, "To be sure, none of the Democrats have
collected donations on the scale of President Bush's campaign, and they generally avoid donations from
political action committees. But the Democrats are hardly naifs when it comes to enlisting support from special
interests in Washington and elsewhere, from corporate leaders and from unions in the public and private
sectors."
Talk about your false constructions. Did anyone accuse the democrats of being "naifs when it comes to
enlisting support from special interests in Washington and elsewhere, from corporate leaders and from unions
in the public and private sectors"? A single sentence of context-provided with no numbers whatever-hardly
gives readers a fair sense of who's giving what to whom. Rather, it plays perfectly into the Rove game plan of
selling the country to special interests while proclaiming it to be in the public good. It would have taken Justice
and Tierney about 90 seconds to go to a Web site every political journalist knows and discover that in fact,
Bush has received 28 times more money in PAC donations than Kerry has.
4. A little solidarity on behalf of the truth, please. ABC Political Director Mark Halperin began a campaign awhile
back for reporters to break former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer of his habit of ignoring questions he didn't
like by calling on another reporter who would conveniently change the subject. Great idea, but it went nowhere.
The apogee of a servile media was reached on television a year ago when reporters sat still for a perfectly
scripted imitation of a primetime press conference that had fewer surprises in it than the umpteenth viewing of
an old I Love Lucy episode. There's really nothing that should prevent political reporters from agreeing not to
ask a new question until their colleague gets a satisfactory answer to his or hers. In the long run, such a rule
(which should of course be applied to Democrats, too) would help everyone.
But it isn't just reporters who should show solidarity. The news organizations they work for need to do the same.
Last year, Johnathan Weisman, an economics reporter _at The Washington Post, published a letter detailing
the terms laid down by the White House that he would have to accept to get an interview with an administration
official for a story about outgoing economic adviser R. Glenn Hubbard: The interview would be off the record
only, quotes Weisman wanted to use would have to be e-mailed to the press office in advance of publication,
and, if approved, the quotes could be attributed to "a White House official." Weisman went on to note that even
after he met all these conditions, the official he was quoting demanded that the quote be changed-that words
never spoken be placed within quotation marks. When Weisman met this demand only halfway and the story
appeared, he was met with "an angry denunciation by the White House press official," telling him that he had
broken his word and "violated journalistic ethics." As Weisman acknowledged, he had violated ethics-by
agreeing to all this nonsense in the first place.
The blame here rests not with Weisman, who was brave enough to publicize these details, but with his
employer. Why should the big, powerful Washington Post bow to terms like these? On a regular basis, our
greatest media institutions are accepting conditions that every undergraduate journalism student in the country
is taught to reject. Individual reporters, scrambling for access and scoops, can't change this on their own. It's up
to their bosses and owners.
5. Don't let non-news organs drive the news cycle. This may be the most important point, and you need only
think back to the last election to see how it might work this time. Some right-wing radio host or FOX will push
some tale about the Democratic nominee. It will either be an outright de
ception (Gore and Love Canal), a perverse distortion of something that contains a small kernel of truth (Gore
and the famous "standing student" in Sarasota, Florida), or something completely irrelevant to the man's
qualifications to run the country (Gore and fully buttoned brown suits). It will be framed as reflecting the
nominee's "character." And many voters, who pay only moderate attention to the news and don't give any
thought to how and why the information in front of them gets there, will buy into it.
Every serious journalist will know, deep down, that it's exaggerated, unfair, and orchestrated. But it won't
matter. It will travel from the right-wing media to the cable shows (if, indeed, that can be called "traveling" at all)
and then land on the network news shows and the front pages and op-ed pages of the respectable newspapers.
A lot of things get "reported" on shows like Hardball with Chris Matthews and The O'Reilly Factor, and by people
like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh, that are, to be more than generous, not exactly nailed down. The fact
that they are "out there," as an MSNBC producer once said about the report that a witness had caught Clinton
and Monica Lewinsky in the act inside the White House, is not a reason for journalists to put their own names
and that of their news organizations behind them. Journalists need to ask themselves not only whether a -story
is true but whether it's significant. Is it somehow more important that John Karry may have gotten a botox shot
when the nation's deficit is shooting out of control and Iraq is proving not only unmanageable but turns out to
have never been threatening?
The high-minded dodge for tabloid reporting of this type can be found in claims like that of Mickey Kaus: "[T]he
Kerry Botox story is not a frivolous bit of gossip but a perfectly legitimate synecdoche for this type of Kerry
behavior." Well, anything can be declared a "perfectly legitimate synecdoche" for any type of behavior by that
standard. Botox or no Botox-and we don't have a position on this-has nothing whatever to do with carrying out
the duties of the presidency. Save that crap for those who at least admit to being entertainers first and
journalists second (if at all).
JOURNALISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENJOY THEIR WORK AND
take pride in it. Otherwise, why bother? We are not typically overpaid or commanding of the respect in society
that doctors or successful businesspeople enjoy. The profession experienced an all-too-brief injection of self-
worth in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. "When you find yourself covering sex and sleaze stories,
you're not terribly proud of it," explained Clarence Page, a Chicago Tribune columnist. "It wasn't the kind of
thing 1 could go home and talk to my kid about. Now my son comes to me with questions about Afghanistan. 1
feel proud of what I do ... ."
If journalists demonstrated the kind of tenacity in going after key political stories that they did during that brief
shining moment, well, America will have an election worthy of the world's oldest democracy, and reporters and
editors alike will be able to speak proudly of the charge given to them by its oldest written constitution: to
protect and defend the public's right to know its leaders-and to choose them wisely.
ERIC ALTERMAN, a Nation columnist and MSNBc.com blogger, is a senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress and the author, most recently, of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News and (with
Mark Green) The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)Leads America. MICHAEL TOMAS KY is the Prospect's
co-editor and executive editor.
Just what really do these conservatives who indoctrinate the masses want, I asked myself. What motivates them
to assasinate Democratic senators, rigg voting machines, miss count votes, wipe minorities from the voting rolls,
use stacked courts to overthrow unfavorable election results. Is all this just to allow people like Karl Rove to
reward special interests, have they taken over the media just to enrich themselves and their friends, or is it to
create a fascist state where government only serves the interests of the wealthy and corporations at the
expense of the american people. The following article may help understand the criminal class agenda.
The Big Squeeze
Republicans have always defended big business but they have never done it like this.
BY DAVID ,SIROTA
For most Americans, the last four years have represented a low point in our economic history. But for the big-
business interests financing the Bush campaign, these have been high times. In previous eras, and even under
previous Republican administrations corporate America was one of a number of players in the public-policy
arena. But under the Bush administration, big business is both the player and the referee, having finally won its
decades-long campaign to eliminate the boundary between executive suite and public office. No longer does
the private-profit motive compete in the legislative process with public good; profit now owns the process, and
the middle class is left to the vultures. '.
We technically have a representative government, but it is far less like democracy than like WWE wrestling-
entertaining theater with colorful characters, much fanfare, and a few body slams, but ultimately a rigged
outcome. Industry no longer needs to lobby hard for regulatory rollbacks, because many of its own lobbyists
have been appointed federal regulators. Congress openly admits that business writes many of the most
important pieces of legislation. The White House slaps an official seal on memos from corporate executives and
labels them "presidential policy initiatives." The vice president is permitted to own shares of stock in a company
for which he coordinates government contracts. And the Oval Office is occupied by a man whose major life
experience was not public service but money-losing business deals (that somehow seemed to just make him
richer and richer). In short, the government is now a wholly owned subsidiary or corporate America. .
This hostile takeover is no accident. After the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, conservative
business interests began a campaign to intimidate, infiltrate, and ultimately take over Washington. As David
Brock documents in his new book, The Republican Noise Machine, the chief architects of the right's new
strategy laid out an agenda "whereby conservative business interests would create and underwrite a
'movement' to front their agenda." And, slowly but surely, the campaign worked. This Republican Party-big-
business nexus massaged its propaganda during the Nixon years, fertilized it under the Reagan administration
in the 1980s, and incubated it into legislative experiments after taking over Congress in the 1990S. The George
W. Bush era is simply the full-grown out-of-control, bastard child of this 30-year orgy that's been running
roughshod over the middle class.
- -The business takeover of government seems, at first blush, unremarkable-like something that has been with
us for years and is as natural to the order of things as the ocean's tides. But it is not natural at all. It is new,
historically speaking, and blatant even by the standards of recent Republican administrations. To illustrate how
far down this road we've actually gone, just contrast George W. Bush's categorical refusal to regulate the
market with three of his Republican predecessors. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and expanded the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission-all agencies chartered to protect average people. Even while ideologue Ronald Reagan was doing
his best to soak the poor, he was forced to increase at least some corporate taxes in his 1986 tax-reform
package. And according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, George Bush Senior increased funding for
regulatory enforcement by 18 percent.
This administration, by contrast, resists any government intervention or deviation from the big-business
agenda, no matter how dire the situation. It is all the culmination of the industry's -master plan: Take over the
government and remove it as an obstacle to fleecing the average American. If any legitimate proposals arise to
reregulate the market, they are bludgeoned with any red herring available: Health reforms are tarred as
"socialized medicine," tax reforms are attacked as "job killers." While the fat cats make off like bandits, the rest
of us are left, in five crucial areas of economic life, facing the big squeeze.
_THE HEALTH-INSURANCE SQUEEZE
Last year, Americans spent 14 percent of all their money $1.5 trillion-on health care (such spending is rising at
more than 7 percent a year). And those are the lucky ones: A report by the nonprofit Families USA found that
82 million Americans went without any health insurance at some point
in the last two years, an increase of 7 million from the same study a year ago.
For years, real solutions sat on the table, all of them requiring government intervention in the health-care
market.. Progressives in Congress proposed various single-payer systems, including legislation to extend
Congress's own health insurance program to the general public. In California, the state Legislature passed a bill
forcing employers to provide basic coverage to their workers. Others proposed extending the state-level
Children's Health Insurance Program to cover everyone. Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt suggested a
hybrid: using both tax credits and government spending to bridge the gap. Those proposals have solid public
support. According to an ABC News poll in October 2003, almost two-thirs of Americans said they preferred a
universal system
that would provide coverage to everyone under a government program" as opposed to the current private, for-
profit system.
So why has the president avoided addressing health care in a serious way? Because his health-care-industry
donors are winning big from the existing system. A recent study found HMO profits increased 52 percent last
year alone, meaning an extra $2.3 billion was pilfered from American consumers. These are the same
companies that since 2000 gave at least $13 million to President Bush and key Republicans in Congress, and
who have seven former or current executives in the president's "Pioneer" club (those who gave him $100,000
or more).
Those campaign contributions bought policies that either further pamper health-care executives or actually
remove the government from the market entirely. The White House's major health-care initiative, for instance, is
the "Health Care Savings Accounts." On the surface, the plan seems as innocuous as one of those HMO
magazine ads. It is also just as misleading. In reality, the accounts are nothing more than tax incentives for
employers and HMOs to terminate their existing coverage, raise deductibles and premiums, and make more
money. As one study notes, widespread adoption of the plans could more than triple the annual health-
insurance deductibles paid by workers.
And the White House's Medicare bill was no better. Its signature feature was a multibillion-dollar subsidy for
private health-insurance companies to compete with the cheaper, government-administered program. The new
law also included a little-noticed provision that allows companies to continue receiving a special tax break even
if they reduce their employees' existing health-care benefits.
THE PRESCRIPTION-DRUG SQUEEZE
Turn on the television for more than five minutes and you will inevitably see an advertisement for a new drug.
The ads portray-happy seniors living life to the fullest, amped up on whatever pill the company is hawking. But
the images are a fallacy: We're not going to look as good as those TV people when we're older, and, more
importantly, many of us are not going to be able to afford the pills being peddled. While drug companies
maintain some of the highest profit margins of any. industry in America, drug prices are rising at three times the
rate of inflation, and they continue to skyrocket.
Drug executives have the nerve to say their rip-offs must continue in order to fund the research and
development of new medicines. These executives, backed by innocent-sounding, industry-supported think
tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, claim the "free market" must be left untouched because it has led
to groundbreaking new drugs. What they don't say is that at least a third of all research and development is
funded by the taxpayers. They also forget to mention that the_ industry enjoys massive R&D tax breaks that
allow it to pay 40 percent less in taxes than the rest of corporate America. These subsidies have led to the
development of major name-brand drugs like Taxol, AZT, and Tamoxifen. Our reward for that investment? The
highest price in the world for those same drugs at the pharmacy. As the House Government Reform Committee
notes, consumers
in industrialized countries like Canada, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain all pay at least 30 percent less for
brand-name medicines than consumers in America.
Serious solutions to the price crisis that cost little taxpayer money have been around for years. But the drug
industry, using lobbyists now appointed to key positions in the Bush administration, has convinced Congress
and the White House that it will make less money if any of these solutions is adopted. The claims, of course,
are untrue. A recent Boston University study points out that profits lost to lower prices would be made up by an
influx of new consumers who previously could not afford to buy medicines.
Even if profits did slightly decrease, these companies would be far from Oliver Twist cases. The industry right
now makes more money than it knows what to do with. According to Public Citizen, the drug industry pocketed
$39.5 billion in profits in 2002. That was more than half of the total profits of the entire Fortune 500 combined.
Even if the pharmaceutical industry saw its 14-percent profit margin cut in half, it would still be more profitable
than the auto, computer, and telecommunications industries. Its pleas of poverty are as insulting as Bill Gates
buying you lunch at TGI Friday's and then telling you the meal will put him in the poorhouse.
Instead of mandating serious reform in the pharmaceutical marketplace, the Republicans in Congress have
done everything possible to perpetuate the current system for an industry that has given them more than $65
million in the last 10 years. In 1996, the new Republican majority followed the orders of Republican National
Committee Chairman and former pharmaceutical lobbyist Haley Barbour, attaching an $18 billion drug-industry
tax break to a minimum-wage bill without demanding lower prices from the industry in return. In 2000, the GOP
leadership gutted House and Senate passed provisions that would have permitted seniors to buy cheaper
medicines from Canada.
And this year, President Bush gave the drug companies their crown jewel: a Medicare bill that includes a drug
benefit, yet specifically prohibits Medicare from negotiating any price discounts. The bill will give the industry a
half-trillion dollars to administer the new program, yet without any cost controls, even that sum is not enough to
provide comprehensive drug coverage to seniors. In short, the bill created two new entitlements: a marginal one
for Grandma and a vast one for the pharmaceutical industry.
THE ENERGY SQUEEZE
With automobiles consuming 40 percent of all the oil America uses, a big part of the energy solution naturally
revolves around using less oil in automobiles. In the long term, that means serious investment in alternative
energies and mass transit. In the short term, that requires forcing auto companies to make more fuel efficient
vehicles.
Those simple solutions have been attacked and distorted by energy companies, which in the last four years
have reaped an additional $50 billion to $80 billion in new profits from the current situation. Instead of
acknowledging the problem, these companies turn Alice-in-Oil land fantasy into free-market ideology. The oil
industry's executives claim with a straight face that the Earth "will never run out of oil" and call for more tax
breaks for oil and gas drilling. That kind of rhetoric is translated into fodder for conservative, industry-backed
think tanks that arm law makers with “facts.” For instance the libertarian CATO Institute, which receives grants
from Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Unocal, issues reports claiming that "fossil-fuel resources are becoming more
abundant, not scarcer." Similarly, the Chevron-ExxonMobil-Shell-backed Heritage Foundation issues talking
points actually saying cars "clean our air."
These claims, of course, are wholly without merit: As National Geographic this year noted, "Humanity's way of
life is on a collision course with geology [and] the stark fact that the Earth holds a finite supply of oiL" Experts
agree that, whether five or 30 years from now, supply "will ultimately top out, then dwindle." And there is no
legitimate science to prove that burning fossil fuels is good for air quality or the environment.
But with the White House headed by two oilmen, industry nonsense substitutes for public policy. Within months
of taking office, Vice President Dick Cheney convened a secret task force to solicit oil executives' help in writing
federal energy policy. No matter that Cheney still held stock options and received a salary from the oil
behemoth Halliburton, which stood to profit from the policy decisions. What mattered was paying the industry
that gave the Bush campaign almost $2 million.
The resulting legislation was a classic marketplace intervention by the government on behalf of industry-this
time, to pay wealthy oil corporations to do what the government could have mandated for free. Billed as a
"comprehensive energy plan," the energy proposal was nothing more than a series of multibillion-dollar tax
breaks for oil and gas companies. Even though the president's own economic guru admits "the technology
exists for sharply reducing and eventually eliminating the use of oil to fuel cars," the legislation included no fuel-
efficiency standards at all. Making matters worse, the president proposed budgets that simultaneously cut
funding for alternative fuel and hybrid-engine research while creating a new, $100,000 tax write-off for people
who purchase gas-guzzling Hummers. .
Even the most serious crises brought no action. During the West Coast energy crisis, when Enron was fleecing
at least a billion dollars from consumers and laughing about it, the White House refused to support temporary
price caps and pressured allies on Capitol Hill-including those from the West Coast-to vote them down.
THE WAGE SQUEEZE.
As the Economic Policy Institute reports, average Americans' paychecks are getting smaller. During the
"recovery" we hear so much about, the industries adding jobs pay about 13 percent lower than industries
cutting jobs. In other words, people are being thrown out of their higher-wage manufacturing and information-
sector jobs and shoved into low-wage restaurant and temp jobs.
Looking to the November election, the president feels he must ignore this reality and try to convince us that
everything is hunky-dory. He says "our economy is getting stronger," and the vice president claims "real
incomes and wages are growing." Yes, it is true, CEO pay is on the rise and corporate profits have risen by 62
percent since the last recovery. But in that same period, wages for workers have decreased by 0.6 percent-the
worst record of any "recovery" since World War II. As The New York Times noted, "The amount of money
workers receive in their paychecks is failing to keep up with inflation."
The president could have pushed the federal government to step in and mandate an increase in the minimum
wage from its almost 50-year low, in terms of real inflation-adjust dollars. Such a move would mean an
immediate pay increase_ for roughly 9.9 million workers. With the poverty level
increasing two years in a row for the first time in nearly_ decade, he could have argued that we at least need a
minimum wage that lifts a family above the federal poverty line. True no one really expects a conservative
president to push to increase the minimum wage. But this president did more than merely oppose an increase;
he actually sought out ways deregulate the labor market and slash pay even further, offering a series of
policies that help his corporate benefactors cut their costs. First came legislation to eliminate overtime pay
protections for 8 million workers. Then came efforts to preserve more than a billion in government handouts to
companies that export jobs. Then the president's top economic adviser trumpeted the outsourcing of U.S. jobs
to cheap overseas labor markets.
Now, the executive agencies are taking over. According The Associated Press, the Bush Labor Department
began "suggesting ways employers can avoid paying overtime" to their workers. Similarly, The New York Times
reports that the Bush Commerce Department is participating in "conference and workshops that encourage
American companies to put operations and jobs in China." And the Bush Treasury Department has tried to defy
federal-court rulings by tempting to legalize "cash balance" pension schemes that I reduce retirement incomes
that companies promised to thier older workers.
THE TAX SQUEEZE
Consider some statistics from the president's tax policy: by 2010 more than half of all the president's income-tax
Cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population (those making an average salary of $1 million); by 2006,
the average millionaire will receive a tax cut of $52,000, while the average American worker-earning less than
that tax cut, or $36,000 a year-will get less than $600.
But the story does not stop there. Along with tax cuts for the rich, Bush's budgets actually raised fees by almost
$20 billion, including increased surcharges for veterans to receive health care. At the same time, states were
forced to raise taxes by $14 billion to deal with deficits, while experts estimate local property taxes rose an
average of more than 10 percent between 2001 and 2003. And because these levies are not graduated like
the federal income tax, they hit the middle class particularly hard.
So it is no wonder that at the end of this so-called tax cutting era, polls show ordinary Americans saying that
they have not felt any real tax relief. As The Washington Post notes, economists agree that "Bush's tax policies
have shifted more of the tax burden to the middle class."
What makes the situation so tragic is that the White House had such a historic opportunity to use the tax code
to fight for the middle class, not against it. The recession, along with a massive surplus, gave the president all
the political capital he needed. He could have expanded the Earned Income
Tax Credit, a tax policy widely praised for rewarding work and helping people move out of poverty. He could
have embraced a proposal to create regular rebate checks for every American, so that General Electric's jack
Welch received the same tax rebate as his factory workers on the shop floor. There were even proposals to
reform the payroll-tax system, changing it from one that exempts income over a certain level to one that
exempts income below a certain level.
But to conservatives, that would have been heresy because it would mean no tax cuts for the wealthy few who
fund their political campaigns. It means no tax cuts for large chemical and oil companies, like those enacted
when the White House eliminated cleanup taxes on industrial polluters. It means preserving the estate tax, a
levy that falls only on the wealthiest 2 percent of America, not eliminating it, as President Bush did. It means
admitting a problem exists when the wealth of the top 1 percent doubles at the same time the wealth of the
bottom 40 percent gets cut in half. It means reversing the practice of giving a $52,000 tax cut to every
millionaire in America while 1.7 million Americans fall below the poverty line.
In short, it means having a dialogue about what conservatives decry as "class warfare"-issues of rich and poor
we all have to deal with but aren't supposed to talk about because it makes fat cats uncomfortable.
AT A HIGH-SOCIETY DINNER DURING THE 2000 CAMPAIGN, George W. Bush looked out on the audience
and joked, "This is an impressive crowd. The 'haves' and 'the have-mores.' Some people call you the 'elite.' I
call you my base."
We should give him credit: It is a rare occasion when a conservative politician admits who calls the shots, even
in jest. Most of the time, the right wing's real motivations are hidden under the populism of a cowboy hat, or in
the fine print of books about the free market.
But what is happening in this country is no laughing matter. Average Americans are being screwed as never
before, and our government is helping those turning the screwdriver. The result is that George W. Bush has
become not just a "war president" on foreign policy but also on domestic policy. Only here at home, he is
waging a war on the middle class, and the results have been downright devastating. .
DAVID SIROTA is a writer for the American Progress Action Fund.
You may contact Robert Jastrebski at:
Rjastrebski@peoplepc.com
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